The present invention relates to methods and systems for defining and handling computer interactions. In particular, the present invention relates to methods and systems for establishing communication protocols between devices in a system, such as with a telecommunication system.
Computer Supported Telecommunication Applications (CSTA) is a widely adopted standard suite for global and enterprise communications. In particular, CSTA is a standard that specifies programmatic access and control of the telecommunication infrastructure. Software can be developed for a wide variety of tasks, ranging from initiating and receiving simple telephone calls to managing large scale multi-site collaborations via voice and video.
CSTA is standardized in a number of ECMA/ISO (ECMA International Rue du Rhône 114 CH-1204 Geneva, www.ecma-international.org) standards. The core operation model and the semantics of the CSTA objects, services and events are defined in ECMA-269. These CSTA features are defined in an abstract and platform independent way so that they can be adapted to various programming platforms. In addition, CSTA is accompanied with several standardized programming or protocol syntax, among them, ECMA-323 that defines the extensible markup language (XML) binding to CSTA commonly known as CSTA-XML, and ECMA-348, the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) binding. These language bindings, considered as part of the CSTA standard suite, insure maximum interoperability, making CSTA features available to computers running different operating systems through any standard transport protocols, including Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), or Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
Recently, CSTA has witnessed a strong adoption in the area of interactive voice services. This adoption has been advanced by enhanced voice services based on Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), which is further described in the SALT 1.0 Specification found at www.saltforum.org. By utilizing SALT, call centers can further be automated to include various speech related features. However, differences in call control and speech control applications create difficulties in facilitating distributed speech services. Thus, there is a need for establishing protocols in facilitating speech services.